Two months from Bellator PPV, 'Rampage' Jackson does PRP therapy for knees

Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney said he gets daily calls from Quinton Jackson, who raves about how good his knees feel.

“He said his knees haven’t felt this good since he was 18,” Rebney told MMAjunkie.com.

Although self-reported, the reassurances are a good sign to the executive, who’s invested heavily in “Rampage” in the latter stages of the fighter’s decade-plus career in MMA.

Bellator’s parent company, Viacom, is also betting big that former UFC champ Jackson (32-11 MMA, 0-0 BMMA) can return to form when he fights fellow ex-UFC champ Tito Ortiz (16-11-1 MMA, 0-0 BMMA) in the promotion’s first pay-per-view event, which takes place Nov. 2 at Long Beach Arena in California.

When Jackson steps into the cage opposite his former training partner and fellow UFC antagonist, it will have been 10 months since he last fought and over two years since he won a fight. A trio of losses marked the end of his octagon career.

Most MMA observers aren’t expecting much out of the fight, which is why a competitive and entertaining bout would be a win for the fighters and the promotion. Jackson, of course, has said he feels like a new man under the Bellator banner and expects to fight past his previously stated cutoff age of 35.

When he fights Ortiz, he will be doing so on presumably better footing.

Rebney told MMAjunkie.com that Jackson recently underwent platelet-rich plasma therapy to repair his ailing knees, which were surgically fixed this past year, courtesy of the UFC.

According to Rebney, the work was done in sometime in the second week of September. Bellator initially considered flying Jackson to a German doctor who first developed the treatment, but found an affiliated office in west Los Angeles.

Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant made headlines in 2011 when he traveled to Germany for the experimental treatment, which involves taking blood from a patient and spinning it to extract platelets that can then be re-injected into an injured area to spur growth of new, healthy tissue.

While not universally accepted by the medical community, PRP has been embraced by several other star athletes.

Considering the other option Jackson faced – another surgery – it was the most expedient course of treatment, especially since the fight is less than two months away.

“It’s one of those processes where there’s not a rehab period after you get done doing it,” Rebney said. “You can literally start utilizing your knees immediately when the process concludes.”

Rebney said that in early conversations with Bellator, Jackson repeatedly said his knees were to blame for poor performances in the octagon.

“I sat down and had a lot of conversations with Quinton about what was missing, and the thing that he kept going back to over and over again was, ‘I’ve been fighting on knees that I couldn’t even press off on,'” Rebney said. “We were at the office one day and he took me down to the car, and he was like, ‘I can’t even get in an out of my car. If I can’t get this fixed, I’m never going to be the fighter that I was again.’

“So we looked at the different options, and this was the first step. If this worked perfectly, and it worked really well, then we could stop with that step. If it didn’t, then the option was to have knee surgery. But this worked well so well that we haven’t needed to do anything else.”

Jackson this past week began training camp in Rosarito, Mexico, and Rebney said the fighter is on track with his weight cut. Jackson previously has struggled with the scale in transitioning from the off-season to camp.

Rebney said PRP isn’t a cure-all for Jackson’s longstanding knee problems, but the procedure should have “an elongated, seasonal, multi-month benefit to the impacted area.”

Of course, longer benefits bode well not only for Jackson, but for Bellator, who helped the fighter foot the bill for the treatment.

“We worked with ‘Rampage’ as part of a bigger overall process on it to make it work for him economically,” Rebney said. “I don’t want to get into all the specifics. We didn’t pay for it, but we worked a process out to cut the cost very substantially for him.”

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